9/10/10 3:56 PM EST

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) flew from Canada to San Francisco on Friday to personally tour the site of a ruptured gas line that set off a blaze that claimed at least four lives, injured dozens more and decimated 38 homes in the Bay Area suburb of San Bruno.

“A full investigation must take place in the coming days to determine the cause of this horrible accident …” Pelosi, whose district is just north of the area, said in a statement. “However, our first responsibility must be to the families of those who have lost lives, the injured, and those who have lost their homes.”

Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said the speaker had been in Ottawa attending a conference of G8 speakers when she decided to make the trip back to the Bay Area.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which probes pipeline accidents, dispatched a four-person team to the area on Friday. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency authorized an assistance grant that allows local governments to be reimbursed for most of their firefighting costs, said Nancy Ward, who oversees California for FEMA.

California Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, serving as acting governor while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is traveling in Asia, declared a state of emergency, freeing up state funds.

Speaking to reporters near the disaster site Friday, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), whose district includes San Bruno, said she was working to secure additional federal disaster assistance for residents and businesses impacted by the fire.

“This is an extraordinary community, it's extremely tight-knit. Generations of families have lived here forever,” Speier said. “We will all come together. We will restore these homes and the lives of these people, and we will see San Bruno thrive again.”

8/27/09 12:51 PM EST

Liberal California Democratic Rep. Pete Stark, a major public option proponent, tells the AP that party moderates (i.e. the Blue Dogs) are "brain dead" for wanting to deny Americans access to a government-run plan.

Stark is chairman of the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means committee.

''They're for the most part, I hate to say, brain dead, but they're just looking to raise money from insurance companies and promote a right-wing agenda that is not really very useful in this whole process,'' Stark told reporters on a conference call.

5/28/09 3:40 PM EST

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is wasting no time jumping into the fray of the California governor's race — throwing his endorsement behind former eBay CEO Meg Whitman — an abortion rights advocate who favors some rights for gay and lesbian couples.

5/19/09 7:44 AM EST

Former San Francisco Chronicle reporter Marc Sandalow was spurned in his attempts to get Nancy Pelosi's cooperation on his biography of her a couple of years back -- but he buys her version of the CIA briefing mess.

1. She's not a liar -- she's just crummy in front of a mike. "During 21 years' reporting... I encountered elected officials whom I regarded as friendly sources who looked me in the eye and lied. Pelosi is not one of them. Pelosi can be awkward, suspicious and at times disdainful of the press. She shunned me when I wrote her biography, refusing to grant me a single interview. But I have never seen a shred of evidence of her being untruthful... Columnist Charles Krauthaumer noted Pelosi’s uncomfortable performance and tortured syntax at a news conference last week, calling it proof that she was not telling the truth. Clearly Krauthaumer has never been to a Pelosi news conference before.

2. She's a stickler for protocol.

3. Other Dems, like Bob Graham, more or less support her account.

4. Leon Panetta and Pelosi are old buds -- and he hasn't actually called her a liar. "Pelosi urged Panetta to run for governor in 1998, and her daughter made up “Panetta for Governor’’ hats... If the CIA has internal documents which show Pelosi is wrong, it is hard to image Panetta wouldn’t have warned her off."

Number one seems like the most compelling point. Two and three are debatable.

Four is off-base, I think.

Back in March when I was working on a story about Pelosi's enemies-frenemies list several sources asked me why I wasn't including Panetta's name -- to my surprise.

[P]eople with ties to both say the speaker was more than a little annoyed that Panetta backed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan to create an independent panel to redraw the state’s legislative districts, a proposal that might have endangered Pelosi’s Democratic allies in the state Legislature."

“If you asked her, she’d say she loves Leon, but there is a strain” in their relationship, said a person with knowledge of the situation.

2/20/09 9:20 AM EST

California Republicans succeeded in pushing through an "open" primaries provision as part of the state's titanic budget deal -- and it could have a serious impact on the biggest Congressional delegation in the nation.

If the open system -- a pet project of Arnold's -- makes it through (and the odds are probably stacked against) it might prove a boon to moderates and third-party types.

And that would be bad-ish news for the staunch progressives who dominate the delegation, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Here's how an open system might work: The top two vote-getters, regardless of party, face off in a decisive run off.

Let’s take a very liberal district, for instance, in which half-a-dozen Democrats are running. In the current system, the winner of the Democratic nominee would be certain to win the general election. In an open primary, that is not the case: the odds are high that the top two vote-getters will be Democrats.

The intra-Democratic contest would thus only be resolved in a runoff, and independents and Republicans would help choose which Democrat will be elected. This is an obvious boost to moderates of both parties, who will have a far easier time building majorities in the runoff than in their party’s closed primary.

The San Diego Union-Tribune says a bigger factor will be the influx of centrist independents into what had been closed party primaries, which could moderate previously polarized districts.

[I]n some overwhelmingly Democratic districts in San Francisco and Los Angeles and heavily Republican districts in Orange County and elsewhere, two Democrats or two Republicans likely would qualify for the runoff.

In those cases, independent voters and others from a district's minority party likely would vote for the more moderate of the two candidates in the general election, backers of the proposal say.

This may explain why some Dems were teary-eyed when they voted for it to be on the ballot in '10. Still, the open system would have to pass a statewide constitutional amendment vote -- which will be opposed by both party establishments -- and a similar measure failed in 2004.